Gone [closed]

Gone.

It was strange, thinking ‘gone’.

Watching wave after wave smack into the shore, pull away with seafoam clinging and fading to the sand before crackling to disappear just in time to be replaced, it was hard to understand gone. Gone was a sticky hand in his, wide eyes the same color staring up for answers he didn’t know. Still didn’t know. Gone was a hiccupy laugh and chubby cheeks below flopping curls of sand-brown, lighter than the sea-dampened expanse in front of him, but not by much. Gone was his baby brother.

Technically, Tay supposed he’d left first. Just old enough to go, just young enough to not understand what it meant to do so. Which may have been an excuse at the time, but seemed fairly hollow now. There were a few scraps of hide, but letters to loved ones weren’t really in the budget of an apprentice Healer, and the only responses had been written in a woman’s hand, because the younger brother had never learned his letters, and the guardian struggled with them. The young man watching the waves sighed, and his fingers stopped plucking the harp he’d borrowed, needed to keep his hands busy so their busyness might sooth their mirror in his mind. Unconsciously, his fingers left the strings to instead stroke honeyed wood, shining from oil and smooth from age, unadorned. Apprentice-made but not without skill.

It was easy to fall into the trap. Into twisting around his thoughts, thinking about himself instead of the lost boy. Was it really right for him to stay? For him to stand? For him to even be here? Aunt Farah had screamed and hidden her face from his, from the ghost she saw in his features, had accepted the draconic escort back to her seaside home without seeking Tay out again to say goodbye. All in all, Tay considered, they were a generally bad lot at goodbye. Much better hands at leaving, though, as a whole. His hands at last stilled, draping unhappily over the wood as wave after wave repeated the pattern and pulled away, clinging as it did so. Tay supposed he ought to be looking at the sky, or the sands, to say goodbye to the boy sent between but the sea had taken from him before, and he recognized loss in the water in a way that wasn't carried in clouds.

But this wasn't, at heart, about him, and Tay leaned over to scoop up a small, smooth rock, rubbing it between the callouses of knuckle and forefinger, slinging it into the sea and relinquishing those thoughts with it. Forgotten, wiped clean.

He stood in silence, wrapping the harp in piles cloth as he'd been asked and his gaze shifted from the waves to their source, to the vast, silent blue calm stretched before him. He gave his brother the only thing he could think of, that they shared. A smile, crooked and warm and uncompromised, untouched by lingering sadness.

And said goodbye.